Rather than change attitudes, maybe we can change behaviors.
People can still be prejudiced, but they may not act on or express those prejudices if they know that such behavior is counter-normative.
A Simple Example: (not) smoking in certain places
Just because a social norm exists doesn’t guarantee that people will follow it, or that norm violations will be sanctioned.
Example: you know littering is wrong, but…
Normative compliance depends crucially on the belief that others are also following the norm.
Some people use the term “descriptive norms” or “empirical expectations” to refer to these beliefs about others’ behavior .
These two sets of beliefs need not coincide!
Consider: in many countries, most people think that corruption is wrong. Yet lots of people are corrupt anyways! Indeed, the fact that other people are violating the honesty norm gives me license / justification to also break the rules.
Even internet trolls know that most people find hate speech socially unacceptable.
So there’s no point in trying to change anyone’s beliefs about injunctive norms.
This leaves us with two options for reducing hate speech:
Four treatments:
A Case Study:
Even before his election to the US Presidency, Donald Trump was already infamous for his embrace of racist (and sexist) views. After all, he announced his candidacy by calling Mexicans “drug dealers” and “rapists.”
Polls leading up to the 2016 US Presidential election consistently predict a moderate lead for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Very few people seriously thought that a majority of Americans would vote for him.
Of course, in a shocking turn of events, Trump beat Clinton on election day. This result surprised most Americans.
Divide into groups, and consider the following hypothetical experiment (based off a real design by Bursztyn et al.):
You recruit a random sample of Americans to take part in your study. You
pay them 10 USD for taking your survey. After answering some basic
demographic and political questions, you ask them whether they would
like to donate their 10 USD participation fee to an organization called
the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
Survey participants read the following information about FAIR:
The Federation for American Immigration Reform is an immigration-reduction organization of concerned individuals who believe that immigration laws must be reformed and seeks to reduce overall immigration (both legal and illegal) into the United States. The founder of FAIR is John Tanton, author of “The Immigration Invasion” who wrote “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”
Participants’ decision to donate or not is your outcome variable.
Unbeknownst to participants, your survey is actually a randomized experiment.
Participants in the control group receive information that their donation decisions will be made in private:
Note: just like any other answer to this survey, also your donation decision will be completely anonymous. No one, not even the researchers, will be able to match your decision to your name.
But this assurance of privacy is not provided to participants in the treatment group. Instead, they are told:
Important: in order to ensure the quality of the data collected, a member of the research team might personally contact you to verify your answers.
Either the treatment or the control prompt is shown to participants immediate before they are asked to make their donation decision.
Imagine you were to field this study twice: once before the 2016 election, and once afterwards.
You run a study which is similar to that just described, but with a few
changes.
First, rather than sampling from the US population as a whole, you only sample political independents (i.e. people not affiliated with either the Democratic or Republican parties). For our purposes, suppose further that political independents are neither particularly “woke” nor particularly racist.
Second, there is only the treatment condition described above. You don’t have a control condition.
Third, you field the study as a 2-wave panel. That is, you are able to re-interview 100% of the same people in both waves, and thus compare how their decisions change over time.
Finally, you have a question in your pre-election survey which asks people whether they think Donald Trump will win the election. Amongst your sample of political independents, how people answer this question is uncorrelated with their racial attitudes.